Space Station Gets Shielding, Not Blasters

by Bill Christensen | June 04, 2007 02:15pm ET

Russian
cosmonauts climbed out of the International Space Station last Wednesday
afternoon to install protective panels on the Zvezda Service Module. Commander
Fyodor Yurchikhin and flight engineer Oleg Kotov completed the planned work
five hours later. The space walk was delayed due to problems encountered during
communication checks. The 17 protective panels, each about 2 feet by 3 feet and
weighing 15 to 20 pounds each, were delivered to the station last December.

Flight engineer Kotov retrieved three bundles of Service
Module Debris Protection Panels and then attached them to Zvezda (see location).
Zvezda
provides some of the station's life support systems, as well as living quarters
for two crewmen with a treadmill and a bicycle for exercise. A second spacewalk
planned for June 6th will complete the installation.

NASA engineers are concerned that orbital debris,
in the form of everything from rocket parts to Chinese
ASAT test debris to dropped wrenches, will damage the ISS. It will be
possible to turn the ISS slightly to present a shield to oncoming debris,
assuming that the object is big enough to be tracked.

Science
fiction writers have been working on protection for spacecraft for
generations now, and frankly, nobody's interested in those passive bolt-on
panels. To paraphrase Han Solo, panels are fine but they're "no match for
a good blaster at your side."

In his 1945 classic First Contact, writer Murray
Leinster puts his money on blasters as the best way to deal with any object
large enough to damage your ship.

The
blasters are those beams of ravening destruction which take care of
recalcitrant meteorites in a ship's course when the deflectors can't handle
them. They are not designed as weapons, but they can serve as pretty good ones.
They can go into action at five thousand miles, and draw on the entire power
output of a whole ship. With automatic aim and a traverse of five degrees, a
ship like the Llanvabon can come very close to blasting a whole through a
small-sized asteroid which gets in the way.

I know it's a lot of extra work, but it gives you a smoother
ride than those deflector
shields that George Lucas suggests. If you didn't mind using a bit of
propellant, you could try the solution that George O. Smith suggests in his
1943 story Recoil  meteor-spotting radar:

Spacecraft
were protected from meteors by means of radar that was coupled to the steering
panels of the ships; when a meteor threatened, the ship merely turned aside by
that fraction of a degree that gave it safety.